Earth's Waters Are Losing Oxygen, and Scientists Want the World to Pay Attention

Key Points

• A Scripps-led review published June 30, 2026 argues aquatic deoxygenation should become the tenth planetary boundary.
• Warming, nutrient pollution, and reduced deep-water ventilation are draining dissolved oxygen from oceans, lakes, and rivers.
• The authors warn current oxygen loss may be approaching irreversible levels within human lifetimes.

Image: Scripps Institution of Oceanography - Underwater Oxygen Loss Threatens Earth’s Stability, Researchers Warn

Oxygen is vanishing from the world's waters. A review paper led by scientists at UC San Diego's Scripps Institution of Oceanography, published June 30, 2026 in Limnology and Oceanography, makes the case that this loss is not a side effect of other environmental problems but a planetary-scale crisis in its own right.

The study synthesizes decades of research on what scientists call "aquatic deoxygenation," the decline of dissolved oxygen across oceans, coastal waters, rivers, lakes, and streams. Its central argument: dissolved oxygen conditions should be formally added to the Planetary Boundaries framework, the nine-process model introduced in 2009 to define a safe operating space for humanity.

"The health and stability of our planet depends on the health and stability of aquatic ecosystems, which need oxygen to function normally," said lead author Erica Ferrer, a Scripps alumna now at UC Santa Barbara's National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis, according to UC San Diego. "This study is designed to elevate the profile of aquatic deoxygenation as a global threat and show that it does not operate in isolation."

Image: ScienceDaily - Earth's waters are quietly running out of oxygen, scientists warn

What Is Driving the Loss

Three forces are responsible. Human-caused warming reduces how much oxygen water can hold. Excess nutrient pollution, largely from agriculture, feeds algal blooms that consume oxygen as they decompose. And changes in ocean circulation are cutting off the supply of oxygenated water to deeper layers, ScienceDaily reported.

The consequences cascade through food webs. Fish, crustaceans, plankton, and the microbes that cycle nutrients all depend on dissolved oxygen. Marine mammals breathe air at the surface but still suffer as their prey relocates or disappears and habitats degrade.

A Tenth Planetary Boundary

The existing nine boundaries include climate change, ocean acidification, biodiversity loss, freshwater change, land-use change, chemical pollution, biogeochemical flows, atmospheric aerosol loading, and stratospheric ozone depletion. The review maps how deoxygenation interacts with and modulates all nine of these processes, and identifies four indicators that could be used to define a global oxygen boundary.

Image: Tech Explorist - Oxygen is vanishing from Earth's waters

As Tech Explorist reported, the team concluded: "The present levels of oxygen decline indicate we are nearing a tipping point, past which human-caused Earth-system impacts will be largely irreversible within the span of most people's lives."

Senior author Lisa Levin, a biological oceanographer at Scripps, said the idea for the paper grew out of attending COP25, the 2019 UN Climate Change Conference in Madrid. "Adding aquatic deoxygenation to the Planetary Boundaries framework will help us understand its impacts on Earth system stability," Ferrer said, per UC San Diego. "Mitigating its impacts represents a critical component of maintaining biodiversity and climate."

Jan Umsonst, commenting on the study on LinkedIn, noted that hydrogen sulfide outgassing from deoxygenated coastal systems and lakes "makes living along the affected coasts a deadly health hazard," calling the feedback loops "massive" across all scales.

The study's eight co-authors span Scripps, UCLA, Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, and the Institut de Physique du Globe de Paris. For the full analysis, UC San Diego's coverage provides the most complete summary and links to the original paper.

Sources: UC San Diego, ScienceDaily, Tech Explorist, LinkedIn (Jan Umsonst), eScholarship

In the period leading up to the Second World War, technological advances were rapidly redefining everyday life, including the widespread use of a new class of superchemicals that promised to solve all our household problems. Perfluoroalkyl and polyfluoroalkyl substances, or PFAS, are a class of synthetic chemicals known as “forever chemicals”, which have quietly infiltrated our daily lives.

A new report from the Deep Sea Mining Campaign says a threat tied to seabed mining has gone almost entirely unexamined: radioactivity.

The report, released June 30 as the International Seabed Authority met to debate mining regulations, points to a 2023 study by researchers at the Alfred Wegener Institute in Germany that found alpha-emitting radioactive isotopes concentrated on the outer layer of polymetallic nodules, the potato-sized mineral deposits scattered across the Pacific floor that mining companies want to extract.

That study, published in the journal Scientific Reports, measured radium-226 on nodule surfaces at levels that, in some cases, exceeded Germany's radiation safety limit by a factor of 100 to 1,000. Nodules stored in poorly ventilated spaces also released radon gas at concentrations that could climb well above international exposure limits, the study found. During metal processing, some of the radioactivity, including actinium-227, could become further concentrated in the rare earth elements extracted from the nodules. The AWI team said it plans to study whether nodules from other parts of the deep sea carry similar radioactivity and how to weigh the ecological, economic and social risks that follow.

The Deep Sea Mining Campaign report does not claim that mining has already caused ecological damage from radioactivity. Instead, it lays out what its authors call a scientific blind spot: No peer-reviewed studies have examined how radioactive material released by mining would move through marine food chains or what doses marine life would actually absorb.

The plan to bury carbon under remote Indiana farmland is supposed to be a slam dunk for the climate, according to its supporters—all generously funded by US tax dollars.

But as far as Melissa Harrison and some other residents of Clymers, Indiana, are concerned, it just might be the end of their town. “This is our place,” she says. Generations of her family are buried in the cemetery, and she is raising her five grandchildren in one of several dozen white-clapboard homes among corn fields and industrial plants serving the farming industry.

Now a local ethanol plant has spearheaded a project to bury vast stores of carbon deep in the geologic formation that runs under the town and surrounding farms.

The government subsidies for the plan, which is supposed to help prevent global heating, are so generous that companies all over the country have been rushing to get permission for similar projects.

But residents around some of these carbon sequestration projects are organizing to stop them, making Clymers an epicenter of emerging national tensions around these projects.

While international climate monitors say carbon sequestration projects could be secondary tools to help contain global warming, they also say the main focus must be on urgent and deep cuts to fossil fuels. Some environmental groups question the benefits of carbon sequestration and are concerned it could delay the transition to clean energy and pose risks to surrounding communities.

TOPEKA, Kan. (AP) — A proposed legal settlement with the U.S. government would require the Keystone Pipeline system’s operator to pay a $26.9 million civil penalty over a major oil spill in Kansas in December 2022 and spend about $40 million more to prevent future accidents.

With some still unable to accept humanity’s role in climate chaos, we tackle common misconceptions and deceptions

I will not say this is a silver lining. War should not be the driver for this change. However, here we are.

I will not say this is a silver lining. War should not be the driver for this change. However, here we are.

A heat wave scorched much of the eastern United States over the Fourth of July weekend, bringing extreme temperatures that caused roads to buckle, snarling holiday traffic.

Nowhere was this more dramatic than on a stretch of concrete-paved Interstate 97 south of Baltimore, where one lane of traffic suddenly warped, forcing its closure. A city street in Chicago experienced a similar, though less dramatic, pavement failure, and several state departments of transportation warned motorists to watch for additional heat-related road damage.

Scientists say such heat waves are becoming more common and more intense. Climate change is driving more extreme temperatures, along with heavier rainfall. Both can contribute to pavements expanding and cracking, making roads temporarily impassable as they await expensive repairs. It raises the question: Are the nation's roads ready to meet the challenge of a warmer, wetter future?

Civil engineers say the answers aren't entirely straightforward.

I took some time to build on a post I had here, and expand it into a broader discussion on climate impacts. I focus on the Happiest Place on Earth as it sweltered in near-deadly wet bulb conditions, AC failed, and asphalt liquefied. I discuss how the area is built for a climate past, still relies on old systems to design and grow, and what it's impact is now.

Family ties to Alsace go back five hundred years. Two generations ago some moved to the US to avoid the, let's say troubles, between the region and France after WW1. Those that are there reported their gardens simply shriveling. Unbearable heat they only escaped in their cellars. So much smog and traffic because people were trying to a) get into AC in their car and B) get to the mountains.

These are the ripple effects often underreported. 1,000 deaths of the exposed and the elderly is bad. Quite. But there is so much more danger and disruption than we encounter in the reporting.

In late April, visitors to Harbour Lights in Falmouth, Cornwall, may have raised an eyebrow. The fish and chip shop was in the midst of a “cod-free week”, its owners having removed cod from its menu entirely.

It was the second time owner Pete Fraser had undertaken the experiment, 15 years after the first. He also removed cod from his shops in Penzance and Helston, replacing it with coley, pollack, hake and hoki. The result was very different. “Some of the feedback we had, which certainly wasn’t what we got when we ran it years ago, is ‘Can you repeat this?’ Before, it was like, ‘Have you guys lost your head’?”

Part of the motivation for chippies making moves like Fraser is down to price. The average cost of a fish supper has risen from £6.48 in 2019 to £11.17, according to the Office for National Statistics. A barrage of pressures, from Brexit to dwindling fish populations and fishing quotas, pandemic inflation to war in Ukraine and the Middle East, has sent prices, particularly of cod, soaring.

Owners report regulars visiting less and, that when they do, they are often now sharing meals. Hundreds of chippies are up for sale; almost half of owners are “extremely worried” about the future, according to the National Federation of Fish Friers (NFFF).

Take a stroll over to digital Walt Disney World over on reddit. Normally a festive little consumerist corner of the internet, now a downtrodden affair melting in tragedy. The concrete house of mouse, notorious for a lack of shade and unhealthy relationship with asphalt, broke cast members, rides, and guests. In other words, the systems designed for a climate of the past did not heed the warning of the displaced Mr. Toad's finale. Hell is, indeed, terrifying. And hot. Very, very hot.

Let's take a step back from that for a minute though. For the uninitiated, what would become Walt Disney World was a detour into something comfortable for a grieving company. Walt's last brain child before he died of lung cancer was largely scrapped for a near carbon copy of the humble Anaheim location. But bigger and transplanted to a sparsely populated swamp. To keep the encrouching businesses far away from "the happiest place on earth" the Magic Kingdom sat a good 10-20 minute drive from every property line. Two hotels, a theme park, and a very forward looking transportation network greeted the first guests. Frankly, it was quite beautiful. And it just felt cool, in a temperature sense. Trees, undisturbed sub tropical forests, rivers and creeks twisting through otherwise multilayered canopies. Canopies thick in a way reminiscent of crunchy peanut butter. So much packed into such little space. It was also an urban planning and transportation triumph for decades.

I admit, I am always impressed when I open plans and cases to show students what is possible in urban design and enginereering. I always point to the trash chutes whisking away your half eaten burger to a compost pile that helps make biofuel for a bus fleet. I marvel with the students at the tens, no, hundreds of thousands of people moving by bus, boat, monorail, train, tram, ski lift gondola, and car. The movement and storage for food, water, and sewage makes even a grizzly general weep over the logistical glory. I never, however, looked at HVAC. I did today.

Today, Lake Buena Vista, the "city" the resort claims, hit nearly 94 F. That's 34C and a few digits for the rest of the world. A humidity above 50, nay above 70. A whopping 85%. A "feels like" temperature of 111 F or 43 C on the asphalt addicted, shadeless, reflective surface that is Main Street, USA. Hotter in the stifling queues of Thunder Mountain. Inescapable in the theaters, showrooms, restaurants, and hotels. The air conditioning, bled into the air in open storefronts and buildings all across the resort, could not keep up. People on reddit complained, expecting compensation for the sweltering temps and bad cooling systems left over from the Eisner years. I read too many comments. Many not capable of coming to grips with just how overwhelmed the climate control system was. Perhaps ignoring the reality of today, and blaming a nameless subsystem somewhere behind a "cast members only" sign was a trauma response to dropping $10,000 on a weeks vacation to a place you could neither go outside in nor sit in a room to escape. I no longer looked at whimsical trash slides under a Pecos Bills. I think of cooling failure and the redditors unable to see, or face, the bigger problem. You can't engineer or complain your way out of an active environmental systems collapse. You also should not rip out all that cooling and fill the landscape with generic skyscraper hotels. Boy does Bay Lake and the Seven Seas Lagoon just look like a tragic case of Sketchup Contemporary Style now adays.

You see, Walt Disney World was designed for a world in a climate past. When an event like this was not only rare, but a statistical improbability. You engineered systems around much understood norms. Humidity stays in this range. Temperature that. Metals react in such a way. You stamp the approval and make an air duct. You leave trees off a street because its tough to maintain the sidewalk. You keep the doors to the candy store open because the cool air and the smell invite you to come in and buy. Get out of the heat, a rice krispie treats begs, and indulge. That's all gone. If not gone altogether, today was an indicator that it will be quite soon. If the over engineered everything in Mickey Town couldn't hold up, how screwed are our other systems? Very if the hospitals I know of are any indicator. Where HVAC matters a lot, and where a ten year old system can't filter out fungus anymore because its too humid. But back to theme parks.

I focus on one comment. That the Wilderness Lodge lost all cooling. Angering, how dare they fail, and two free room nights. I want to scream at the absurdity. You could die in such an environment. You can not evaporate your sweat in wet bulb conditions very close to what we saw in WDW today. You can go for a walk from Space Mountain to Splash, and simply die. Even for the in shape, which are few and far between amongst folks debating between another Dole Whip and an abnormally large Turkey leg, the walk is dangerous. But such guests asking for a few nights or a coupon for a $16 jack and coke (yes, that is typed right) aren't entirely off their rocker. I come to empathize a bit. They want compensation for a climate disaster in a way. More people are going to, as well, for everything from light rails failing commuters in Portland, farmers finding their crops rotting quicker. It makes me glad I'm not in insurance. I'm also very glad I don't have to be the 20 something college program intern facing an angry mom of 4 demanding a less melty Mickey Mouse Ice Cream Sandwhich. Both professions have a rather dismal future.

Alas, poor (Disney) World. I knew it, Beehawian.

The Gila River is among the Southwest's most important rivers, delivering water for people, farms, and wildlife while linking the snow-fed mountains of southwestern New Mexico to the desert lowlands of southwestern Arizona.

In wetter years, seasonal snowfall on the Mogollon Mountains and Black Range provides much of the river's spring flow and helps refill San Carlos Reservoir, which is formed by the Coolidge Dam. When filled to capacity, the reservoir is one of Arizona's largest bodies of water.

However, in 2026, lackluster snowfall left the mountain snowpack in the Gila River watershed at 2 percent of the 1991-2020 March median. The limited snowpack pushed April streamflow to 39 percent of normal. By June, after mandatory water releases for downstream agriculture, the reservoir held less than 400 acre-feet of water.

The Landsat image above (right) shows the near-empty reservoir on May 22, 2026, when it stored 389 acre-feet of water—less than 1 percent full; the other image (left) shows the same area in June 2023, when it was about 60 percent full. The green vegetation growing along the river channel and reservoir edge includes a mixture of tamarisk, willow, cottonwood, sedges, and grasses.

FULL ARTICLE: There’s some good news growing along the coasts of countries around the world.

Mangrove forests, the imperiled ecosystems championed for their ability to store carbon and protect land from storm-driven flooding, are bouncing back.

These woodlands that thrive at the soggy boundary between land and sea suffered alarming declines through much of the 20th century, chopped down chiefly to make way for fish ponds, rice paddies and other kinds of agriculture. But in the last decade, mangroves have been gaining ground, erasing nearly all of the losses since 1980, according to research recently published in Science.

“After decades of loss, we’re finally seeing a global turning point for mangroves,” said Zhen Zhang, a postdoctoral researcher at Tulane University and lead author of the study.

Zhang and colleagues used computer programs to comb through 40 years of satellite images from around the world. The distinctive way mangrove forests reflect light enabled them to train the computers to pick out this vegetation and track its ebb and flow over time.

The analysis revealed that in much of the world, years of loss began changing course in recent decades. Between the 1980s and 2010, global mangrove forests shrank from around 155,000 square kilometers to 152,000 square kilometers, a loss equal to half of Rhode Island. While that might not sound like a lot, mangroves often grow in relatively narrow coastal strips, so their coast-protecting benefits are outsized compared to their overall dimensions.

Since 2010, forests have rebounded to nearly 154,000 square kilometers, almost enough to recover from the losses dating back to the 80s.

“While some mangroves are still being lost, this could make them a rare conservation success story and an important source of optimism for climate action,” said Daniel Friess, a co-author who heads The Mangrove Lab at Tulane.

The greatest gains have come in southeast Asia, home to roughly a third of the world’s mangrove forests. The region gained more than 1,000 square kilometers of mangroves since 2010, the researchers found. Forests have begun bouncing back in other parts of Asia, South America and the Middle East as well.

While the reasons for the rebound vary from place to place, the researchers say many of the gains appear to be from forests colonizing terrain created by abandoned aquaculture ponds and from mudflats emerging along shorelines as sediment builds up. That is coupled with efforts to plant new mangrove forests, as governments and conservation groups have come to better appreciate their benefits.

In Indonesia, once a center for mangrove declines, the recent gains appear to be linked to increased awareness and restoration on the heels of the devastating 2004 Indian Ocean tsunami, coupled with increased legal protections and management, the authors reported.

It’s not all good news, however. Some regions continue to lose ground, notably in Africa. There, mangroves have declined in recent years in Nigeria’s Niger Delta, the continent’s largest mangrove system, due at least in part to damage from oil pollution.

And some places that are making gains still haven’t recovered from previous losses. Myanmar has witnessed a 10% increase in mangrove forests since 2010. But that still leaves it with a net 29% decline since the 1980s.

The tree’s remarkable ability to quickly colonize land suggests that rather than pursuing tree-planting projects, conservation work might be better spent protecting existing forests and the earth-building dynamics that create mudflats, the authors noted. The trees can then spread on their own. Sometimes the most important thing humans can do for restoring nature is get out of the way.

Zhang, et. al. “Unexpected expansion and regrowth in Earth’s mangrove forests over the past four decades.” Science. June 4, 2026.

US political and media discourse has drifted away from the climate crisis amid a frontal assault by Donald Trump upon policies to limit global heating and the president’s pugnacious demands to “drill, baby, drill” for more oil and gas.

Yet while elite attention on climate has waned, even among some previously vocal Democrats who have wound back on criticism of the fossil fuels that are overheating our planet, the American public remains concerned about the climate crisis and continues to favour action to deal with it, according to experts and polling.

“The 2024 election was not a referendum on climate change – Americans believe in climate change, worry about climate change and support action on climate change,” said Anthony Leiserowitz, director of the climate communication program at Yale University. “That didn’t change before, during or after the election.”

About two-thirds of Americans say they are worried about the climate crisis, Yale’s longstanding climate polling has found, with this proportion staying consistent even as other topics such as the Iran war and inflation have dominated news cycles.

However, people in the US are hearing and reading less about climate change as the media shrinks its coverage of the issue, despite mounting heatwaves, droughts and other impacts that have roiled parts of the country. Outlets including the Washington Post, NPR and CBS have also cut climate journalist positions.

Rising temperatures may trigger a dangerous increase in “hydroclimatic whiplash” in rivers that would make traditional approaches to flood and drought planning insufficient, a study has found.

As temperatures rise owing to the worsening climate crisis, rivers will experience increasingly rapid transitions between heavy downpours and long dry spells – called hydroclimatic whiplash events – because a warmer atmosphere holds more moisture, intensifying rainfall extremes.

Sudden swings from dry to wet conditions may increase the risk of flash flooding, the study found, because intense rainfall on dry, hardened soil is less able to infiltrate the ground. Instead, water can rapidly run off the surface leading to local flooding and water quality deterioration, as well as soil erosion because intensive rainfall can flush pollutants into the rivers.

In comparison, wet-to-dry shifts can make drought planning harder because preceding wet conditions may create a false sense of security before a rapid move into drought.

Former federal climate experts warn that atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations hit a record high in May and that the monthly average global temperature this summer could rise as much as 3.5 degrees Fahrenheit (1.9 degrees Celsius) above the pre-industrial benchmark used to measure the heating from greenhouse gases.

Research shows human-caused warming will contribute significantly to deadly heat waves, intensified storms and wildfires, atmospheric scientist Zack Labe said as he opened a Tuesday briefing by a team of experts with Climate Central, a nonprofit research and communications organization based in Washington, D.C.

Labe and several other members of the Climate Central team are former National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration scientists. They decided to provide public monthly climate updates after NOAA, citing Trump administration budget cuts, canceled its briefings last year. Climate Central’s monthly briefings are part of a larger effort to ensure useful climate information remains available to the public as the current administration tries to erase the topic from government records.

Several other research groups, including Berkeley Earth and Copernicus, the European Union’s climate change service, also provide monthly public climate updates with data collected from global climate monitoring networks.

“We heard from a lot of folks that they missed the NOAA briefings and being able to talk with experts,” said Climate Central’s Tom Di Liberto. “We were happy to tap into Climate Central’s expertise and combine it with our NOAA experience to bring this to fruition.” He added that Labe leads the monthly briefing and aims to establish the links between human-caused warming and climate extremes.

PJM, the country’s largest power grid operator, is in a tight spot. Thanks to the data center boom, there’s never been more demand for electricity, but years of delay in the interconnection queue has choked off new supply, and PJM’s laissez-faire approach to transmission planning has left us with a grid that needs expensive and time-consuming upgrades. This all adds up to soaring prices and declining reliability, with no end in sight.

Against this backdrop, the White House and governors of all 13 PJM states have pushed PJM to hold a so-called Reliably Backstop Procurement (RBP) to support new resources. The basic idea makes sense: Hold a one-time auction to fund new supply, mostly for data centers. Pay for that new supply at a generous guaranteed price but bill it to the companies that need power without raising prices for everyone else.

PJM stakeholders are in the middle of debating how this should work, and PJM’s board will make a decision at the end of June. Tens of billions of dollars and the region’s energy future are at stake. Fossil fuel cheerleaders in the Trump administration clearly see this as an opportunity to lock in fossil power at public expense through the 2040s. Anyone who cares about clean air or their power bill should be making sure they don’t succeed. That’s why NRDC presented an alternative proposal that protects consumers, gives clean energy a fair chance to compete, and simply has a better chance of getting the new supply that the system needs built.

“This would have been a wild dream a year ago,” says Andrea Ceccolini, standing on Arctic sea ice just a 4-mile snowmobile ride from the Inuit town of Cambridge Bay, northern Canada. To his left are sky blue ponds of meltwater created in the last few days by a sun that no longer sets in the high north summer. To his right, the sea ice is still a brilliant white, the light dusting of snow on top continuing to sparkle.

“It’s incredibly different, the boundary – I mean, you can point to it,” he says. The difference is the result of a bold geoengineering experiment being conducted by Ceccolini’s company, Real Ice, funded by the UK government.

Five months earlier, the team had braved temperatures of -40C on the sea ice to drill holes and pump 50,000 tonnes of ocean water up on to its surface. It froze almost immediately, thickening the 1.5-metre-deep ice by about 50cm, according to the new measurements. That has protected the ice, at the start of the melt season at least, and is an early sign that one day, perhaps, it may be possible to refreeze a significant part of the Arctic.